About the Role
- This role seeks a strong design leader to spearhead a coherent, cross-platform experience across Real Estate, ensuring tight alignment across brand, product, and design.
- The position is instrumental in defining a unified experience that is intentional, high-quality, and consistent across all user touchpoints, while shaping how AI and design come together at scale within OLX.
- Why the role exists: As the Real Estate business scales, the experience faces fragmentation, inconsistent patterns, and limited governance over quality. The goal is to move toward design that is systematized, scalable, AI-readable, and governed with clarity and intent.
- This is a craft-first leadership role, not a pure manager or a pure strategist.
- Success looks like: The Real Estate experience feels cohesive, high-quality, and intentional; design decisions are guided by clear systems and principles; teams move faster through well-defined patterns and guidelines; the design system evolves into a scalable, AI-ready foundation; and craft quality is visibly higher.
- This role is not for those who prefer managing teams over designing and crafting experiences, those who focus primarily on strategy without driving execution quality, those uncomfortable with ambiguity, or those who do not enjoy working deeply on systems, patterns, and details.
- Location: This role can be based in Spain (remote or Barcelona), Portugal (remote or Lisbon), or the Netherlands (remote or Amsterdam).
- Please note that OLX does not offer relocation support for this position. Candidates must be currently based in one of the listed locations, though OLX will support local visa transfer processes for those who already have the right to work in one of these countries.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead Craft & Quality: Set and uphold a high bar for interaction, UX, and visual design quality across all Real Estate experiences; identify gaps in experience consistency and drive alignment across teams; and turn strong design instincts into explicit, repeatable standards.
- Own Design Systems & Governance: Define how the design system is applied, extended, and governed within the vertical; establish clear guidelines, principles, and usage patterns; and partner with design systems teams to ensure coherence across OLX while enabling vertical-specific needs.
- Drive AI-Ready Design Foundations: Lead the evolution of design systems and patterns into structured, machine-readable formats; ensure components, patterns, and flows are designed for AI-assisted creation and scalability; and explore how AI can generate and validate UI patterns, improve consistency and quality enforcement, and accelerate design and build workflows.
- Hands-On Craft Leadership: Design and prototype critical flows and interactions; push for excellence in the final stages of execution; and bring clarity to complex problems through strong design thinking and making.
- Influence Strategy: Shape product direction through design-led thinking; partner with Product and Engineering leaders to define objectives; and use design to connect user needs, business goals, and technical possibilities.
- Mentor and Elevate the Team: Act as a craft leader across designers; provide feedback, coaching, and guidance to raise the overall quality bar; and create a culture of taste, detail, and continuous improvement.
What You'll Bring
10+ years in product design, with experience operating at Staff or Principal level.
Proven track record of shipping high-quality, complex digital products.
Strong expertise across UX, interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, and end-to-end product experiences.
Deep experience with design systems and scalable design frameworks.
Ability to define standards, guidelines, and governance models that teams adopt.
Experience reducing fragmentation and increasing consistency across multiple teams.
Understanding of AI/ML product design patterns, including prompt design, conversational UX, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop patterns, progressive disclosure, and trust calibration.
Comfort with technical AI concepts and the ability to collaborate closely with ML engineers and AI researchers on interaction models, edge cases, error states, and confidence thresholds.
Active use of AI tools in your own workflow, across prototyping, research synthesis, design exploration, or code-assisted design.
Strong interest or experience in AI-driven product experiences or workflows.
Understanding of how design systems evolve into structured data, tokenized systems, and machine-readable patterns.
A builder mindset where you design, prototype, and refine.
High attention to detail and strong design taste.
Ability to operate with autonomy in ambiguous environments.
Outstanding communicator and facilitator who can align teams through clear, compelling design narratives.
Experience in mentoring and growing designers.
Strong cross-functional collaborator, building trust with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and business stakeholders.
About OLX
- OLX builds marketplace sustainable ecosystems for buying and selling cars, finding homes, landing jobs, and trading secondhand goods.
- The company culture is built on innovation, commitment to outcomes, collaboration across 50+ nationalities and 7 markets, and a customer-led approach.
- Brands include AutoTrader, OLX, Otomoto, and Property24.
- OLX is backed by Prosus, one of the world's largest tech investors.
- The organization aims to become an AI-native organization, where intelligent systems and human-centered design create faster, smarter, and more meaningful customer experiences.